The big Mission/Pais/Listan Prieto thread.

WINE TALK
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Stopped in this afternoon at the Oakland Yard wine shop to taste a flight of wines from Louis-Antoine Luyt - a native of France who has become a noted producer in Chile. Although he makes a number of wines, some of his best-known have been made from the País grape - a variety also known as Mission in California and still found in the Canary Islands under the original Spanish name of Listán Prieto. País has been grown in Chile for centuries and some vines there are very old. It’s never had a reputation for making profound wines but it can make a very pleasant - and sometimes quite intriguing - everyday type of wine. Luyt’s “Pipeño” line of wines is his take on Chilean campesino or peasant wines, using traditional methods and minimal intervention.

I looked at a few wines near the front of the wine shop before heading to the wine bar toward the rear, and who did I spot there but Al Osterheld! He’d gotten there a few minutes before I did and was just beginning the wine flight himself. Oakland Yard featured four of Luyt’s wines - Pét-Nat of País, “Margarita Flores” Rosado of País, Pipeño Blanco “Portezuelo” (skin-fermented blend of Torontel (Torrontés), Corinta (Chasselas), Cristalina (Sémillon), and Muscat d’Alexandria), and Pipeño “Laja” País. Both Al and I have tasted a number of Luyt’s wines before but all four of these particular wines were new to us. We pretty much agreed on our impressions after tasting through the four wines, with the Pét-Nat being our favorite, the Pipeño “Laja” next, then the Pipeño Blanco and the Rosado. A fun and educational tasting!

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2018 Rajat Parr Pais: Crazy fruity nose. Light in color. Has that carbonic, whole cluster juiciness to it, but still with a lot of length. A hint of natural wine vibe. Almost a little spumante/effervescent. Really enjoyed it, one of the better Missions from California. Amador County, which probably means Deaver Ranch, right Ken? Old vines. Great little wine.


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Yes, Raj told me that the fruit was from Deaver Ranch when I tasted this wine at Brumaire in Oakland earlier this year.

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Just picked up a 2016 Pisador Cauquenes (Pais) from Gran Cata here in DC. They have a few more various bottles of Mission/Pais wines there if any DC folks are interested. Looking forward to trying this in the next couple weeks.

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Let us know how it tastes! [cheers.gif]

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Interesting observation at my Lodi Mission pick yesterday. I roll up to start the pick on my first 4 tons and see all these bins stacked to the side. Walk over and see a very familiar logo on the side of all of them…


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So I query the manager and sure enough: Pax is taking 20 tons of Mission and having it shipped to his winery in Sonoma. 20 tons is no small start, I should add. That makes him by far the biggest Mission producer in California overnight. Which is great, as I assume it means three things:

  1. He’s confident he can shift it.
  2. He’s confident in the quality of the variety.
  3. By virtue of being Pax and endorsing it, he automatically sprinkles fairy dust on it.

I’d like to think I was early in my confidence that interest in Mission would increase, but it’s good to see there are really big players feeling the same way. [cheers.gif] [thumbs-up.gif]

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Finally got around to trying this.

2016 Pisador Cauquenes - País (Listán Prieto) - Bottle 9 of 3300

Nose was all tart red fruit, some mint, and some earthy notes. Very pretty. Taste has delicate, yet powerful sweet red fruits, earthy bits, and a rather beefy tannic spine. Has a strong acidity. Obviously young, but with the lightness and acidity, it has a structure and flavor profile that was parallel to Trousseau or Passetoutgrain. I would say this could age at least mid-term 5yrs, but with the fruit and acid, it may be able to go 20 or longer. Hard to know as I don’t know the Mission grape well. 90

This was overall really tasty wine. I would certainly buy again. It went pretty well with Chicken piccata, wild rice, and zucchini fritters.

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That’s the thing. Because it’s hard to extract deep color from Mission, I think subconsciously winemakers have vinified it in a “light” style, i.e., early pick, not long on skins, very little oak or aging. But it’s not a light grape - it has a lot of tannins and backbone, pepper notes etc. They’re always a lot bigger than the color would let you believe. So I agree with you that, vinified correctly, they have potential for aging. They do lack in acid a bit, so there’s that that speaks for not being so age-worthy. But so does pretty much every red grape in California.

I just got Ryan Stirm’s 2018 Rosa de Peru (Mission) sent to me. Handwritten bottle, not sure it’s been released yet. He said it’s pretty natty, but I really look forward to trying it. He’s doing a 2019 as well that he says he’s really excited about.

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Do you know where Ryan sourced his fruit for this wine?

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Not sure, think it might be from the Wirz vineyard or somewhere there in San Benito. I’ll ask.

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Have seen hints of this on Patrick Cappielo’s instagram. Looks like it may be sold under this label: https://www.monteriocellars.com/

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Adam posted this paragraph in another thread on the board, and I wanted to add some comments.

The Mission > [at Somers Vineyard in Lodi] > we don’t know for sure how old they are, but they’re at the very least 50 years old, but could be 120 years old (Ken Zinns think they might be). Very vigorous producers still. As for Mission, the attrition has been all-encompassing. Today there are only about 4 places that still grow it: Deaver and Story ranch in Amador, Somers in Lodi and small planting in Santa Barbera/Santa Ynez area farmed by the Rusack Vineyards. I just got an email from a grower in Placer Country I had not heard of before, so that takes the number up to 5 known Mission plantings. Wine started in Los Angeles and in 1850’s, over 400000gals of mainly fortified Mission wine was shipped to San Francisco alone for consumption. That was after Los Angeles and NY markets had been supplied, so it’s easy to imagine Los Angeles produced well over 1 million gallons of Mission then. And this was not even peak production either, that was at turn of last century. Staggering numbers compared to today.

Although there are more than five plantings of Mission in California, few if any other than the ones above are of very significant size and even those are relatively small - Deaver’s two old Mission blocks total about five acres and Somers is (IIRC) about 15 acres. Mission has become such an out-of-fashion variety over the years that it’s become rather obscure here. I’ll add a few more to those sites that Adam mentioned above - the ones below are those that I’m either familiar with from tasting and/or talking with growers, or have heard about from others. I’m probably forgetting a couple of others too.

Sierra Foothills:
Bill Easton had told me there’s a vineyard in the Fiddletown area of Amador County with Mission probably planted in the 1920s.
Skinner’s Stoney Creek Vineyard, Fair Play, El Dorado County. Planted 5-6 years ago with the intent of using the fruit for Angelica.

Santa Cruz Mountains / Northern Central Coast:
Two vineyards sourced for the Picchetti (Santa Cruz Mountains) Mission Angelica, from their website: “Our newly-released 2017 Mission Angelica is made up of fruit from two distinctly different locations - the 100 year old Blunden Vineyard, located in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and what remains of the original 5,000 vines that were planted at Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad”.

Paso Robles:
Proulx Vineyard, Willow Creek District. Probably planted around 1950, goes into their Rosé.

Santa Barbara County:
Gypsy Canyon Vineyard, Sta. Rita Hills. Planted 1887, goes into their own Angelica.
Barberena Vineyard, Santa Maria Valley. Don’t know the vine age, fruit goes into the Foxen fortified Mission wine, similar to Angelica.

Cucamonga Valley:
Galleano estate vineyard. Planted in the 1940s, goes into their Angelica - I think they may source Mission from other sites as well but I’m not sure.

San Diego County:
Los Pilares estate vineyard, in the Wynola / Julian area east of Escondido, at 3,600-foot elevation. Mission among a number of varieties planted within the past two years.

There are almost certainly additional small Mission plantings in the Lodi area and in parts of the Sierra Foothills, possibly in Cucamonga Valley (though old vineyards there sadly continue to be lost to other development), and perhaps in San Benito County and other tucked-away viticultural corners of California. And there may well be Mission vines in older “mixed black” vineyards from the 19th and early 20th centuries that have not been identified as Mission yet - some may be in old sites in Sonoma County and elsewhere.

As far as the age of the vines at Somers Vineyard in Lodi, we were told they were planted in “the '70s” though it was never really clear what century! The implication was 1970s though, but I can’t think of why anyone would have planted a good-sized vineyard of only Mission vines in the 1970s so that’s why I’m guessing they may very well be older - though the price of winegrapes in Lodi, particularly 40-50 years ago, was so low that the difference in planting Mission vs. Zinfandel or other varieties may not have been that significant. Many of the Mission vines at Somers are large and unusually tall, but I don’t know whether that’s due more to their age or due more to the planting location - in rich alluvial sandy soil right in the Mokelumne river bottom.

Hope this is a useful addition to info on Mission vines in California.

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Thanks you for that comprehensive list, Ken! Much more than I thought!

I should add that a gentleman contacted me just last week about a Mission vineyard in Placer County. It is 26 acres large (which would make it one of the biggest ones in California) and was planted 75 years ago. I was very intrigued to hear about it and look forward to go an visit it in the new year.

As for the age of the Somers vineyard, it seems to me that it’s very plausible that they could be that old by their sheer size (they’re like trees, some of them). But Tegan Passalaqua doesn’t think they are that old based on the trunk support trellis - he thinks they’re most likely from the 1970’s. I don’t know who’s right, but if they are from the 1970’s, they are by far the biggest 40-50 year old vines I’ve ever seen. The 118 year old Flame Tokays I harvest, are about half the trunk size of the Missions, so if they’re only 50 years old, they must have grown like crazy.

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There had been a lot in the Hecker Pass area. The legendary charming weasel grape broker down there used to sneak a bunch into the lots he sold to unsuspecting winemakers. Birichino makes one from the Besson Vyd.

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Tried to get my hand on a bottle of that Birichino Mission, but they only made a barrel, so no dice. Hope they make one in 2019.

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I’m pretty sure I’d either heard about or read about Tegan’s assessment before, and I also heard the 1970s planting date from Marco Cappelli, who led me to the vineyard in 2015 - he’s the winemaker at Miraflores in El Dorado and consults for other producers, and was formerly at Swanson in Napa Valley. Marco is probably the most experienced and knowledgeable Angelica producer in the state. At first I thought the vines had to be much older but more recently I’ve thought that the 1970s date could be correct. A lot of Lodi fruit is still really cheap but that was the case to an even greater degree in the '70s, and since most fruit from the area at that time ended up in large blends made by huge producers (still the case with a good deal of Lodi fruit), it might not have made that much difference what grape variety was planted there. Maybe the former owner of the Somers property was able to get some really cheap Mission cuttings and figured why not? I doubt that they had any idea that the demand for Mission would grow in the late 2010s!

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Certainly a plausible explanation. The Mission is vigorous and hardy, so if it just went into some non-descript blend, then why not plant something that can give good yields? Sadly for them, the prices for Lodi fruit are still rather suppressed. Heard Gallo paying $180/ton for machine harvested Zin to some vineyards… [cry.gif]

BTW, just ordered some Proulx Mission Rose. Didn’t know about that one before. And drank my 2nd bottle of Rajat Parr’s Pais from 2018. Yep, it’s still very enjoyable. Peppery and nice. Heard it sold out already, so there seems to be people beside nut jobs like us who buy it.

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The only vintage of Proulx Mission Rosé I’ve tasted was the 2014, and that one was 75% Mission, 15% Syrah, 5% Grenache, 4% Zinfandel, 1% Cinsault. I recall that it was pleasant enough, but with all of the other varieties included I didn’t pick up much if any distinctive Mission character. Don’t know whether the more recent vintages have a similar varietal blend to that 2014.

The low price that’s paid for a lot of Lodi fruit is what has led a number of growers there to launch their own labels over the past 20 years or so rather than continue to sell all their fruit to the big producers for next to nothing.

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Just got confirmation from Ryan Stirm that he takes his Mission from the Wirz Vineyard. Only makes about a barrel, apparently.

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Cool - good info! I keep meaning to go visit Ryan but haven’t managed to do it yet.